“A keepsake? It didn’t look a lot like one.”
“It’s, er, well. It’s an… inside thing. An inside joke. I have weird friends. Oh, god, I’m really embarrassed. I’m gonna put this back. I will be… right back with you.”
Were her friends big on egg timers? I suppose it was on me for poking around in her living room cabinets… she had kept telling me to make myself at home.
But the speaker system got set up, and I made a point of staying out of her drawers over the following few days while we acclimated to each other’s schedules. Hers wasn’t easy to figure out—I tried to stick to a nine-to-five, or more like a seven-to-seven, which was more of what I was used to, but she spent a lot of time in her room, and she seemed increasingly restless, usually coming out at weird hours. I made a point of knocking on her door to invite her for dinner once I finished with my day of sending out job applications or prompting for freelance work, and she almost always did join me, but usually in a different mood. I’d interrupted her exercise routine one day, when she came to the door flushed, breathless and sweaty, and she’d promised to join me after fifteen minutes and a shower. Another time, I’d heard her making some kind of noises inside, like shewas talking to somebody, and she panicked when I knocked and shouted through the door to tell me she was a little busy tonight, so that night, I had dinner with only myself and a few lingering curiosities that I tried to address when I caught her in the kitchen that night, tapping on the counter behind her. She gasped, whirling back on me, and she went crimson.
“Hi—hello.”
“You look like I’ve caught you in the middle of a terrible crime,” I laughed. “When as best I can tell, you’re… getting chocolate?”
“Ch-chocolate. Yes, well, I really like… chocolate.” She laughed, a little too high-pitched, and she shifted from one foot to the other. I was starting to worry before she said, “Sometimes you just really need some chocolate, you know?”
“Ah.” She must have had some acute kind of menstrual pain, based on the way she was shifting from one foot to the other. “I’ve heard it said that you support hot chocolate and cookies on all days, so… don’t let me limit you.”
She swallowed, nodding, as she pulled the chocolate down from the cabinet and, holding the entire bar up to her mouth, nibbled on the corner like a hamster. I wasn’t one to judge.
“I apologize for interrupting you earlier,” I said. “Was that a work call?”
“Oh, um… s-sort of. Just a little chat with a few people who help keep me paid. Anyway, I have reallyreallygotta get to the bathroom, um… I am so sorry.”
It wasn’t like I didn’t understand. I let her go, and the only thing I was surprised by was her taking the entire bar of chocolate to the bathroom with her, but… different people had to handle their periods in different ways.
But on most days, I was able to get dinner with her, whether that was cooking up a meal together or going out to some of the familiar locales. Money was tight for her at themoment, but I’d saved up enough—and meals were affordable enough here compared to Seattle—that I was happy to pay for them.
She was fun, easy to talk to, genuinely compassionate and always interested in what was happening in my life. She zeroed in on what others had calledworkaholic tendencies, and she didn’t criticize me on them, just centered the conversations around my work, around my job applications, around my work projects, and all the things I actually knew how to talk about, and for someone who didn’t know how to open up to people, I found myself opening up effortlessly to Bridget.
The only problem was that she never really went into details on what she did. No matter what angle I tried to ask her, she always brushed it off with some kind ofI just make things on the internetcomment, and it wasn’t even a full week before I found myself “clocking out” early on Friday and looking up Bridget instead.
Nothing listed on her LinkedIn. She’d stopped updating it since she left our old employer, and it didn’t have any clues about herindependent work.Same for all the social media accounts in her name: business activity only, up until the moment she left her job, and then radio silence.
It was enough that I overstepped my boundaries a little. It was only four o’clock, and she probably knew by now that I tended to stay at my desk until seven, so when I walked out of my room, I let myself pay a little more attention to her room than I normally would, and I slowed down while passing it when I heard her voice from inside. Not like when she was on her call, but quieter, cleaner? Like a rehearsed reading. I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, and I stood there torn in two, knowing I was supposed to move on, but… curiosity killed the cat. If she’d just havetoldme what she did, I wouldn’t be this desperately curious. I was making excuses for something I knewI shouldn’t have been doing. I still did it. I pressed my ear up to the door, my hand over my other ear, listening for what she was saying, horrendously guilty the whole time but not enough to stop.
She sounded like she was reading something, almost like an audiobook. I caught words, bits and pieces, but mostly the intonation felt like a book reading. Some kind of… workplace drama? I caught the wordcoworker, and thisshethat seemed to be the narrator character sounded like she was having complicated feelings about them.
Was she an audiobook narrator? It would explain the acoustic treatments she had on her room, why she’d had it as a separate studio before. But why keep that a secret?
I jumped when my phone lit up in my hand, a call coming in, and I almost fumbled it, elbowing Bridget’s door in the process. I flushed with the mortified realization of what exactly I’d just been doing as I stepped away from her door like it was radioactive, but she’d heard—she’d stopped talking. Dammit. What had even gotten into me?
I knocked on the door, playing it like it was on purpose. “Hey,” I called, hoping my voice came out normal and steady. “I’m finishing up early for today. Are you going to want to do dinner again tonight?”
“Oh, uh…” I heard shifting around, fabric moving. “Yeah, let’s do that. Um… in a bit. I could go for noodles.”
“Noodles sounds great. Take your time, I’ll be in the kitchen.” I left before she could respond, getting into the kitchen and looking at my phone as the last ring went through.
Mother.I always called herMomto her face, but she was alwaysMotherto me. Anything less felt… insufficient, for the person she was.
I wasn’t ready to answer it, but I answered it, opening the window and leaning out to breathe in the cold, dusky air as Isaid, “Hi, sorry, you got me in the middle of something, but I’m here.”
“Areyou here?” she said, her voice cool but something almost amused underneath it. “I would be surprised to learn you’re not. Kevin says he saw you almost a week ago now, but you haven’t made any effort to get in touch with any of us?”
I shuddered involuntarily, but she didn’t sound… angry, necessarily. Just searching for answers. What exactly were the questions? There was always something more under the surface. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just been trying to hit the ground running, and I’ve been focusing on work all this week.”
“Apparently still busy with work even while you’re between jobs. Admirable.”
“Well, you know what I mean. Applying for jobs. I got a freelance gig. Nothing big, but it’s… symbolic, I would say. I feel better now that I’m on the other side of that. And settling in.”
“Has Bridget been helpful?”
